Risking Opening Up Your Heart after Child Abuse

But my question is, how do tell [my therapist] about each memory so she can help me work through them? I am always trying to hide everything from her, knowing she will eventually find out after a crisis intervention. Mostly because I don’t want anyone including her to have a glimps of what I went through. Why should others suffer because I did? I don’t want to frighten her away, even though she has proved time and time again that she is not going anywhere. Am I just fearful of losing the most trustful person in my life? I know I need to work on memory work, but it’s all so painful. I am not questioning her abilities, she even gets consultatiion to help her help me. Why am I so afraid to tell her? I don’t want her to have to keep putting out fires. I want her help and I know she can. I just dont understand why I am reluctant in telling her the full truth. I have been fighting with her somewhat. Do you think she will stop her work with me and pass me off to someone else? Will she think I am trying to push her away? Or do you think she is understanding enough to stick around? ~Karina

Karina’s post reminds me of my husband’s reaction to the idea of transferring our son to a private school that specializes in learning disabilities. We had already tried so many ways to help our son be successful in school, including fighting for an individualized education plan (IEP), getting him tutoring, and being ultra-involved in his school and homework, all to no avail. Transferring our son to this expensive private school was our last hope. In a rare show of emotion, my husband asked, “What’s left if this doesn’t work? We are out of options.”

Karina says that her T has helped her repeatedly and continues to reassure her that she is committed to her, and yet Karina is fearful. I suspect that part of this dynamic is the same as my husband’s, which is the fear of losing all hope. As long as there is something left to try, all is not lost. However, when we commit to the last resort and it doesn’t work, all hope is gone, and then what’s the point of even trying anymore? As abused children, we would rather believe the abuse was our fault, which makes it something we can control, than to sink into complete despair.

My son’s new school was a huge blessing. It’s specialization made it the perfect fit, and my failing student started bringing homes A’s and B’s. Even more importantly, he rediscovered his love for learning. He just needed the right fit for his learning style.

It sounds like Karina has found the right fit as well – a T who is in invested in and committed to her. Her T also sounds fearless, never shying away no matter what new information is uncovered.

I reached a place in my healing process where I had to choose to trust, and that was not easy for me. It was actually one of the most difficult parts of my healing process because my heart had been broken so many times in my life, and I did not think I could survive one more heartbreak. However, unless I mustered up the courage to risk trust, I knew I would never heal. So, I bit the bullet and threw everything I had in taking that risk.

This was not easy for me. I spent the entire morning in the bathroom with diarrhea and fighting off vomiting. I was lightheaded and dizzy, and my heart kept racing like I was about to be thrown off a cliff. No matter how much I fought myself, I forced myself to open up. When I did (and it was well-received), I felt the ice breaking all around my heart and opened myself up to a truly emotionally-intimate relationship. This can be your experience as well, but you have to find the courage to take the risk.

19 Responses

This comment also makes me think about how I sometimes project onto my therapist the all-knowingness & all-powerfulness that as a child I was taught to associate with my mother/abuser. Building a trusting relationship with my therapist has meant, in part, understanding that she is “walking right beside me” (in her words) in my recovery process.

I stumbled across your blog by accident. Your struggles and determination to fight your deamons is an inspiration to all. I’m all the way from South Africa and your highs and lows show that whoever we are, we are not alone. I found a wonderful therapist who has helped me tremendously but I too struggle with opening up the most important part in order to heal. Opening up about my shame is very difficult. Every week I sit opposite this person who does not judge & the only person I trust, yet I just can’t seem to go to that shameful act. I hate the “m” word and felt so very relieved when I read your blog as well as other responses to masturbation. I feel so shameful & evil because I am driven to do it when I feel alone & helpless and thinking of my uncle reminds me of who and what I am and that I am good for nothing. Although I hated what he did & I think it is vile, I do it to myself.I don’t gain any pleasure; it is more of a punishment. I just can’t bring up this subject no matter how much I want to. I guess I am scared of being rejected.

I have written some blog entries on the topic of masturbation as a form of self-injury. Perhaps you could email that blog entry to your T (along with other blog entries or comments) as topics you would like to discuss without actually saying that any of them apply to you. That could open the door to a dialogue with your T.

I was lucky to have a T who was able to stay a step ahead of me. As an example, I was too ashamed to tell him that I was having nightmares about being an abuser, but he was able to figure out that I was struggling with this and brought up the topic himself. He said it is normal for child abuse survivors to dream about being in the abuser’s place as a way to make sense of what happened to them. It’s not about any sort of desire to harm a child — instead, it was about trying to process if there was any way that my abusers could have harmed me while believing they were not. I couldn’t find the courage to raise the topic, but he did, which made it worlds easier for me.

If you email your T some topics that you would like to discuss, you could even mix in some that don’t apply to you so you aren’t “outing” yourself. Your T could raise the topic of each one and reassure you that it’s a safe topic to talk about with him or her. :0)

I could write one book on why I did not risk telling about the horrors and another about how I designed a way to do so.

I do have a suggestion and it is scary. Get what you have written here to your therapist. Mail it or e-mail it. You could bring it with you. If I did that it would not be shown and it would be a not good after therapy day.

Another suggestion I have is protect therapy. By this I mean design a way to have your head right for therapy. For me after years of work this starts the day before. Actually it starts now the evening before. I have lots to do and nothing that needs doing. I have food that I do not have to cook after therapy ready. I schedule nothing the day of therapy including phone calls and try and leave three days free after therapy. I leave therapy and come home and take a nap. I call it a nap it can be hours and hours sometimes it was come home and sleep get up and eat then go to sleep until morning.

One of the greatest gifts my therapist gave me was a consistent schedule. For years I would see her at 9 on Monday mornings and 9 on Friday mornings. I change it to only Friday at 9 due to financial considerations. The schedule is not totally consistent. It is as close as is reasonable.

I find it helpful to bring things to therapy. I now have a hockey gear bag full of things. I like to start therapy with showing my therapist something. A marble I made or something I had drawn or painted. I sometimes give her something a rock or a feather I have found. I often show and then give her photographs I have taken.

After therapy for a long time was a risk. I often could not drive and sometimes really did not know how to walk in traffic. Sometimes I could not find my way home for hours and a few times did not make it home in the same day.

That is what “I” do meaning that is what one group of us does. Others express in therapy often with out “I” and I may or my not be aware of what they are expressing at first. That is OK. It is not that I do not remember as “I” never knew in the fist place.

I can not put to much emphasis on how important expressive therapy is for me both in therapy and by myself in the context of a strong therapeutic relationship. It is not the directed art therapy of draw a door that represents what is in you way and tell me about it. It is letting all of us find there own way of expressing.

I had to design a way that was right for my experiences and stay away from the concept this PTS body which includes the brain was the same as a non-PTS body or the same as other PTS bodies. The body does include the brains.

Bottom line it is hard to do at all, harder still to do completely and it makes everything else harder as it is taxing. For me it is very hard just to have the brains change so that the memories are available it is also hard to take. Once that happens I have to let the memories come into my consciousnesses then deal with them. Then I have to grieve. This is not at all liner nor is it at all predictable.

If I put my energy into no going into crisis than I could not process. To think I can have the memories come into consciousnesses, process and grieve and not have it a “crisis” is not realistic. It can happen with living through many crisis where the focus is not preventing having a crisis.

Healing for me is a matter of staying as not present as possible.

If therapy is therapeutic you are not doing it right. Smile. Therapy is always hard and so is before and after therapy. It is the one thing we can all count on.

Thank you for this.
I do agree my therapist is fearless. And her and I do make a great team. I just hate fighting with her when it comes down to me sharing something I remembered. It almost seems automatic. I think part of it is the fact that she wants me to express the feelings that I have connected to each memory. Either I am afraid to feel, or sometimes I cannot connect a feeling to what I have discovered. But she continuously pushes me to express, and my defense is to fight with her. Not that I want to, it’s just I get so irritated with myself for my automatic response to hide what I am feeling. I don’t want to continue being stuck in a place where I cannot heal. I know this is a lifetime of healing, but sometimes I wish it would just hurry up so I can move on with my life and be happy for once. I am grateful for how far my therapist is willing to go to help. I just hope I don’t push her away with all this blockage.

I split into polyfragmented DID, which means that I often stored the emotions in a different place than the memory of what happened. For particularly traumatizing events, I split the memories, feelings, emotions, senses, etc. into multiple places, and I had to make several passes at the same event to heal from the one trauma.

Regardless of your diagnosis, it is possible that you did not store the feelings with the memories of what happened, which could explain your resistance to your T’s pushing you on this. I would initially recover only the memory of what happened (or a memory of part of what happened) with no emotions at all other than my current-day reaction of horror. After I processed the “what,” the feelings would come a day or two later.

For the most traumatizing memories, the feelings might not come for a long time. As an example, I recovered the memory of what my abusers did to my dog months before being able to process my feelings associated with that night. Chrystine Oksana’s “Safe Passage to Healing” talks about “associating” all of these pieces back together. Until I did, I would cry at dog commercials but could not muster up one tear at the memory. That event hurt me so deeply that I was not able to process the feelings at the same time as processing the memory, and pushing me to do so would have been counterproductive.

I like Michael’s suggestion of emailing your T this blog entry before your next session. I would also include the comments so that your T can see different perspectives on what might be happening on your end. If you split the feelings away from the event in your brain as I did, you might not be able to process both at the same time, which is OK. The feelings will come (and you do need to process them), but it might not happen at the time you recover the memory.

I am not sure if I am considered polyfragmented DID or not. I was diagnosed with DID in 2008. So far there has been 41 parts discovered.

It did help me understand a little to know that my memories and feelings are stored differently. And thanks for the advice on how to deal with them separately since they are separate from one another. I see my therapist wed. And I will suggest this to her.

And I like the idea of taking topics from here that I would like to learn about or understand and discuss them with my therapist. It seems like a good way to start a conversation about something that is not too easy. I really do find all you blogs helpful. Many topics you discuss I can relate to in some way.

It is very hard to talk about something that has brought and continues to cause so much pain and shame…. It could be that the saying of what you experienced is too much for you at this time. Could you maybe try writing it down for her, and then perhaps that can lead to a discussion of some kind or an expressing of your feelings toward it…?

I had a good friend who used to say that if she began crying she was afraid she would never stop. Maybe saying these things out loud right now is just too intense and you are feeling triggered by it.

SHAME is such an ugly word to to survivors of any type of abuse. How can a child be burdened with shame and Having to carry that burden throughout our lives? I have an eating disorder as a result of feeling shameful. My therapist is warning me at each session of how lucky I am to still be alive and that if I don’t stop, I will die by next year as my body can’t cope with the strain. I am extremely scared but yet I relapse almost every day. Every week I see the concern on his face and I become scared but then my shame kicks in once I am safe locked inside my house. But, despite this, I am still fighting.

This is a really good topic and I love all the input. @ Karina- I too have a very difficult time showing my emotions to my T. She never pushes me about it. But whenever she suggests that we could do something to work on the emotions, I draw back from it.
Part of the reason is I was not allowed to have emotions. I was put to shame for them. If I cried I was a baby and selfish. Anger was 100% unacceptable. Too much happiness brought down the judgment. Even the “look on my face” was to be wiped off before it was knocked off.
So emotions meant trouble or abandonment of love.
And too, my T is only there for that hour, until the following week. I mean, I could call if I had a crisis. But I have to go home and be a mom and wife and be able to function like a normal human being. Even the little bit of telling makes that difficult. If I accessed my emotions, one hour would not suffice to deal with them. I fear my whole life would unravel and fall to pieces. T gets to go on with her life as normal. Nobody really understands the intensity of all this, unless they too have been there. There is no way. So it is very important that your T let you go at your own pace- however long it takes.
Trust is something that is earned. You can give trust to someone in little bits like you are doing.
Faith “bit the bullet” and threw caution to the wind with trust and it turned out beautiful. But we do not have to take big leaps into trust. We can take tiny steps. What if something fell through?
That could be devastating to you. Your caution is wise.
I have been with my T for two years now, and just recently have had times that I cried. That was HUGE for me. And I didn’t cry much. But it showed my trust was moving forward.

“I was not allowed to have emotions. I was put to shame for them. If I cried I was a baby and selfish. Anger was 100% unacceptable. Too much happiness brought down the judgment. Even the “look on my face” was to be wiped off before it was knocked off.”

That sounds so familiar to me that it’s as if I could have written it. Most of the time I only really have emotions when I’m alone. For me it’s as much mental conditioning as it is about trust, but the results of undoing even a tiny bit of it are certainly intense. I agree with everything you say; it’s very important that anyone going through this isn’t pushed beyond what they can take for now.

This may be projection on my part. Rest is most important and I do not think I really knew what rested meant. I am not sure that most people even those with out a traumatic past know. I think what happens is the rested is relative and that the reptilian brains go with more rested.

I think that when I said before I as so rested it would have been more accurate to say I am less not rested.

This is beyond the self care thing and taking time for yourself. it is about having an extended period where you do what you need to do when you need to do it. Kinda as little schedule as possible.

As I said it might just be projection as it is what I am in the middle of right now. I am not in therapy and really have had no idea what I am going to do from one day to the next. Before that would have sent me to the place that is so far our I can not even see the ozone.

It was not that I did not rest it was that I really did not know what rest was. I really learned this through therapy and am still learning.

It was tied into why it was so hard for me to share. If I did I for a long time was less rested for days. It is not that you share and it is over. In a way therapy can make things possible then you have to do them.

I believe so too. This morning in therapy, I shared some of what I am learning from you- and rest was one of the things- how you said on one of your posts that you prepare before you go so you do not have to do much but can just sleep and grieve and such.
I also talked about some patterns I see in your blogging and how they have helped me understand a little of my own process.

It was a progression of understanding made easier as the processing got easier and we became more integrated.

We used to do to therapy and then feel like we had been run over by a truck. The only thing similar was when I was training for a marathon and ran 30 miles. What was going on was others were processing and I had no clue. I just inherited this beat up body with not explanation.

It then went to well I must have worked hard as I am exhausted. Then we figured out that if we protected the day of therapy and the days after it was much better. If we have to do something like an appointment that can not be missed we now can adjust and not do as much work.

I had forgotten this The Lazy Boy who has integrated used to tell our therapist “I am the Lazy Boy so no work today.” It never worked it was worth a shot.

Our therapist seemed to sense that we worked really hard every single session. Even at Mclean’s they would say “I do not know what you are doing but I know you are working hard.” It was hard as there was no real results that would make sense to anyone who has not been through it or been with someone as they went through it. Often and is still in a way doing better so we can do worse.

One of the things I have problems with is consistency in therapy. It seems like it is never consistent because what I am dealing with seems to change weekly. It is very frustrating for me because I never get to work through anything. I know that I don’t feel emotions. I have a realm inside and it is named the feeling room. I know this is where my feelings are housed, but accessing those feelings right now is virtually impossible. I do trust my therapist and so do the majority of my parts. I just wish I could access my feelings and that things could be more consistently. I think I will be in therapy forever if things don’t change.

When I was afraid to tell my therapist the truth about my experiences, I told her the truth about that fear, and how I felt about holding back from her. We spent a long time figuring out what exactly I’m afraid of, where that fear comes from, and what to do about it. I think that fear most often comes from false beliefs that also need to be addressed in therapy. It’s hard, but only good things can come from telling your therapist what’s going through your head. I understand how Karina feels.

I am glad you are another who understands. It has gotten easier to share with my therapist, and she hasn’t pushed me off on someone else. Our patient/therapist relationship is still going strong and moving closer to not needing as much therapy. What I now have to say for those of you who are struggling with this sort of thing is give it time. The time is worth it in the long run. Healing work does take time, and you can’t rush it even if you really want it over with. If you are just beginning, if you don’t feel comfortable with your therapist, it doesn’t hurt to try another until you find one you can confide in. It is all worth it. You all can strive, thrive, and heal. Good luck on your journeys.